The Co-operative and Kineo collaborate to create innovative learning for leaders

As part of its organisational development, The Co-operative identified the need to focus on driving consistent development of its top 500 leaders. But how to reach out to this diverse and dispersed group, and challenge, motivate and support them?

Online PR News – 14-May-2011 – – The Co-operative and Kineo have partnered to address that challenge through the Leadership Development Zone, a Moodle based online portal as a focus for leadership development. A new case study on the Kineo website tells the story of its success.

The Co-operative recognised the need for an online portal to act as a focus for their leadership development. With this in mind they commissioned Kineo to help them to realise what this could be like. Over a 9 month journey, The Co-operative and Kineo collaborated to realise the vision. The Co-operative and Kineo teams collaborated to develop the requirements together, with a range of key internal business partners.

Moodle was seen as the ideal solution for several reasons:
- Open source means a cost effective start point with no on-going user licence fees
- The open source nature enabled Kineo to adapt the way Moodle worked with content creation, publishing, search and display
- Houses and supports blended learning solutions effectively
- Mechanisms for feedback are provided, such as surveys and polls
- Moodle is very flexible and scalable so provided a solution which could meet current and future needs

The successful collaboration is leading to great results in the initial stages of the project. Within the first 3 months of launch up to 50% of The Co-operative’s senior leaders have made use of the portal, and that number continues to grow.

Key to achieving and sustaining this success is ensuring the site is actively managed and marketed. This was factored in from the outset, as Mark Harrison, Kineo Director and consultant to the project explained:
“We could have ended up with a well presented website with useful content that nobody looked at. This was identified right from the start as a risk by The Co-operative team behind the project and so together The Co-operative and Kineo and came up with an approach that means there is a constant draw to the site…The Co-operative is using working groups to identify and help design and develop the topics and so everything on the site is fresh, relevant and important.”

Commenting on the overall project, Jackie Lanham, Director of Group Resourcing & Development at The Co-operative said:
“The project has surpassed my expectations. The Leadership development zone has acted as a real catalyst to the formation of a learning culture within The Co-operative. Easily accessed learning at the point of need enables our leaders to be the best they can be.”

To find out more about the project you can access the full case study in the Kineo E-learning and LMS Case studies area (www.kineo.com/case-studies.html).

About the Co-operative

The Co-operative Group is the UK’s largest mutual business, owned not by private shareholders but by almost six million consumers. It is the UK’s fifth biggest food retailer, the leading convenience store operator and a major financial services provider, operating both The Co-operative Bank and The Co-operative Insurance. Among its other businesses are the number one funeral services provider and Britain’s largest farming operation. As well as having clear financial and operational objectives, the Group has also set out its social and sustainability goals in its groundbreaking Ethical Plan, which specifies almost 50 commitments in these areas.

The Group operates over 5,000 retail trading outlets, employs more than 110,000 people and has an annual turnover of £13.7bn. Further information is available at www.co-operative.coop